Legacy of the Naga, Part Four
by Edward Bolme

Ten Years later...

Thunder rolled ponderously across the open plain, l slowly fading into the hoofbeats of a Unicorn bushi at full gallop. Shinjo Masu glanced up at the sky again. The clouds hung low and menacing, threatening a storm at any moment. Even if the east wind rain did not freeze on the way down, the frost covered land would turn the downpour into a bitter, if not deadly, ride.

Thunder boomed again thunder without a flash. The lightning was hidden somewhere amidst the black thunderheads, and what little light there was seemed to illuminate the underside of the clouds far more than it did the war-scarred lands around the rider. Masu urged his steed faster, even though the horse's speed tore the wisps of breath from their mouths to freeze on the cheeks of horse and rider alike. Masu leaned forward and whispered a kind word in his mount's ear, for he well knew the steed was working harder than it ever had before.

"In your next life, you will be born samurai," he said, smiling. Even if I have to arrange it myself, he added silently.

Like all of his clan, Masu had learned to ride a horse before he could walk; thus, the horse needed little guidance from him. It was just as well; the chilled air made his eyes water as it flew past his face, and, between the darkness and the tears, he could see little detail in the terrain. Probably his horse was equally blinded, but the trusty beast knew the way to Shiro Shinjo by heart.

Masu lowered his head, blinked a few times to clear his eyes, then glanced upward over his shoulder again. The bottoms of the clouds grew fuzzy and indistinct. Rain was on the way. He clenched his teeth and waited. Waiting for the first cold drops always seemed the hardest part. Riding low over his horse left his back fully exposed to the rain, and he could feel his kidneys already tensing in anticipation of the coming cold.

He waited. His shoulders tightened.

And then the storm hit. Fat, cold rain fell on rider and horse like a plague of locusts. The water wormed its way into every conceivable crevice, pooling at the base of Masu's neck and running down his spine. Bothersome droplets clung to the tip of his nose. Mud splashed from his horse's hoofs, spattering all around, sticking his hair to his face.

He wished he had worn his helmet.

Hard as the horse had been working, it redoubled its efforts, for it enjoyed this rain not a whit more than its rider. Masu did his best to ignore the cold water and focus on rolling with the horse's stride, hoping to shave even a tiny amount of time off of this ride. It was tortuous work.

And just when he thought he could get no wetter, the clouds burst.

The horse slowed down immediately. It had to; the rain was so heavy that neither horse nor rider could see more than a yari's reach in the darkness. The hapless beast tossed its head to try to rid itself of some of the rain, then trotted onward. For Masu's part, he was only too happy to stand in the stirrups; he had no desire to sit in the saddle anymore.

It also helped to get his rain-soaked clothes off his back.

He did not know how long they moved through the rain in that way; he could not even see the countryside around him to gauge landmarks. Yet somehow the horse's instinct brought them at last to the gates of Shiro Shinjo, solidly closed against the elements. No guards were posted, for only a madman would ride in this weather; moving an army through these storms would be a disaster.

Weary and shivering, Masu fumbled for his hunting horn. He held it in his numb hands, willed his chin to stop chattering, and blew the call of the successful hunter returning home. He hoped it would be audible over the drumming rain. He took a breath and blew again, more to warm himself than repeat his call.

After a short wait, one side of the gate opened. A glass lantern and a guard's head poked out around the door. "Masu?" asked the guard. "Didn't I overhear you say that only a madman rides in weather like this?"

"Yes, you did, and, if you do not let me in, I will be a dead man," he replied. "Then my ghost will chill your bath water for a thousand years."

"I am chilled enough already," said the guard, opening the gate further and standing aside, "though I daresay you now have much more to teach me about cold."

Masu rode in, dismounted clumsily, staggered, and fell onto his back in the mud. "Curse this rain,', he muttered. He felt thin shards of ice crack beneath his hands as he stood up again.

"Some say that the wars have brought this weather upon us," observed the guard.

"Bah! The spirits bring it upon our heads by defying the natural order of things. They should have the good sense to stay dead and await their chance to be reborn. Instead, they break a thousand years of tradition."

Masu kissed his horse's snout, then handed the reins to a waiting stable boy. "Give her double rations,,, he grunted, "and if she's not dried, groomed, and fed by the time my bath is ready, I'll ride you through this rain!"

The guard closed the gate as the young boy ran for the stables, Masu's horse trotting wearily behind. "Others fear what this weather will do to the fields," he added. "Some say the blood of the dead will salt the earth. Others think this rain will wash away all the good soil. Either way, our harvest was bleak enough already this year, and next year will be worse."

"That's enough idle chatter," barked Masu. "You whine like a spoiled child! We survived the Burning Sands, we survived the White Wastes, and we survived the

return to our homeland. We may die in this war, but it will not be by starvation."

"Then the Fortunes smiled upon you?"

"We found a small herd of deer and brought down five. We let the buck and two does live. The other hunters are holding up at the magistrate's station and will come when the weather eases up. I rode ahead to bring the good news. Besides, I have duty tonight."

The guard watched Masu, tired, soaked through, and spattered with mud, lurch toward the keep. "Lucky man," muttered the guard enviously.

* * *

Freshly cleaned and much warmer than before, Shinjo Masu dressed quickly but carefully in his best clothes. He tied his hakama with care, ensuring that no wrinkles marred its appearance. He chose his golden-threaded obi and put that on. He pulled his shirt hem down beneath his obi, making the shirt taut across his chest. His daisho he slipped into place. Once everything else was in order, he picked up a deep green headband adorned with the mon of the Naga.

The headband had not always been worn, but no one spoke of times when it had not. Within a week of the gift of the Golden Pearl, Ide artisans had crafted these headbands for Moto Gaheris, fashioned after the headbands found on the corpses of the Naga messengers. Since that time, no one was ever asked to guard the pearl; when a samurai was to be so honored, he awoke that morning to find one of the headbands outside his bedroom door.

Masu had found such a headband on the morning he was to ride out for the hunt. It was a great honor, indeed, but the clan also needed food, and he was one of the best hunters available. Aided by the tactful intercession of Ide Michisuna, Masu was able to pass the honor along to another worthy, postponing his own shift until this evening.

He braided his hair into the tails of the headband, taking care to ensure the mon was perfectly centered on his forehead.

He was ready.

At least, he hoped he was. He could feel the weariness of the long ride, compounded by the relaxation of the steaming hot bath he had just finished. He was hungry, but he'd decided to get warm and clean rather than fed, so he would have to tolerate a growling stomach. It would take all of his concentration to give his duty the respect it deserved. Death was easy. Not showing exhaustion while standing guard duty all night in a darkened hallwayÑthat was a challenge. He thanked the Fortunes that they had granted him this opportunity to demonstrate his devotion to bushido.

He moved through the hallways of Shiro Shinjo to the Pearl Room. Throughout the castle, servants were preparing it for nightfall. Within a few moments of his arrival, all six guards were present. As the senior samurai of the group, Masu inspected the group and appointed the posts. A passing servant extinguished the nearby lights, plunging the hall around them into darkness. Lights burned further down in either direction, illuminating the hall (as well as any intruders), but here in front of the Pearl Room the only light was the dim, golden glow cast by the treasure within.

The long night's vigil began.

Throughout the midnight hours, the guards never spoke. There was ever only one need to communicate, and that was for a guard to excuse himself briefly. This was accomplished by a single bow. Occasionally, Masu would leave his post to take the post of the guard next to him; this precipitated a complete rotation of the guards, one by one, to new positions, to ensure no one grew complacent.

This night passed like every other duty nightÑquietly and slowly, giving the guards time to bask in the honor of their silent vigil while their comrades slept all around them.

As dawn approached, Masu could feel exhaustion tapping on his shoulder, prying at his jaw, peering into his eyes. He began to focus more and more within, maintaining his face, standing like a bushi. Thus, as the light of dawn began to creep into the sky, he did not notice the change.

He stood at attention, eyes open but not really seeing. A slight movement of the guard beside him caught his eye. He turned his head slightly to scowl at the guard, to let him know he must maintain composure. The guard was looking at him earnestly, then darted his eye to the gossamer veils behind them.

The pearl's golden light had vanished.

For the briefest blink of an eye, panic flashed through Masu's mind. The pearl, ruined on his watch. Dishonorable seppuku. Stolen by ninja. Golden magic lost forever. He fell asleep at his post. Blood magic. Betrayal of his duty.

Then he heard a small clatter, as of a porcelain cup or two dropped gently onto the floor. At the sound, bushido roared to the forefront of his mind. He raised his hand, and two of the guards silently reached for the partition in the thin silken veils. The others placed their hands on the hilts of their katana and readied themselves behind their leader.

Masu's hand cut through the air. The two guards whipped open the veils, and Masu and the other guards charged into the room. They fanned out automatically, ready for anything.

But Masu was not ready to see the golden pearl lying on the floor in shards.

The guards looked around the room, looked at the pearl, looked at their leader. He pried his eye away from the golden pieces and scanned the ceiling, half expecting to see shadowy ninja hiding in the darkened corners. He turned around, making sure no one was trying to slip out the doorway, then motioned to one of the guards at the door to fetch a light. He turned back to the pearl.

The pearlÑparts of it at leastÑlay upon the carved wooden stand, broken open like an eggshell. A golden glow, weak as dying embers, could just barely be seen. The rest of the pearl lay on the floor, one larger piece still rocking slightly. Masu edged closer. His hand tightened on the hilt of his katana, preparing for an iaijutsu draw.

As he neared the pearl's remnants, a small shadow shifted behind the stand. Masu whipped his katana out before he even realized that he'd seen the motion, the blade whistling through the air in a perfect arc. Holding the blade out in front of him defensively, Masu shouted, "Show yourself! Who are you?!"

The shadow shifted again, mostly hidden by the wooden stand. It began to move out from behind the coiled serpent carvings. Masu backed up, giving ground, and he heard other blades sing out of their saya, ready for action. The shadow started to rise.

The guard returned with a lantern and ran into the room.

The lantern's light shone on the face of a young girl, not yet waist-high, raising a trembling hand to shield her eyes from the sudden light.

No one dared breathe. Confusion, adrenaline, and curiosity warred within every guard's heart, and they waited for Masu to act.

The girl slowly lowered the hand protecting her eyes, and the bushi saw large eyes of deepest emerald staring back at them. Masu saw no fear, but perhaps confusion or uncertainty. He lowered his sword slightly, remembering the tales Shinjo Shono had told of the pekkle no oni.

"Who are you?" Masu asked, more gently this time. The girl did not answer.

"What is your name?" he asked again, gruffly.

The girl paused to consider this, eyes roaming the floor randomly. In a voice pure as crystal she finally answered him. "My name is Akasha." ,

* * *

Moto Gaheris sat on his throne and studied the small child in front of him. She stood in the center of the room, wrapped in a kimono hastily acquired for that purpose, and looked back at the daimyo frankly. Even at her young age she looked thin, and the kimono did little to fill her body out.

Earlier this morning, this girl had not even existed. Now here she was. No one had any explanation other than she had come from the pearl. No one could even tell him what she was, if she was even human. She looked perfectly human, except for the tinge of green in her lips and her fingernails. She looked like a child, except for the abnormal depth of her eyes. Her hair had an interesting sheen, too. It didn't look like it would feel like... well, normal hair. Her skin, though, was as smooth and clear as... as a pearl.

The pearl itself was a mystery, as well. When the Naga gave it to the Unicorn ten years ago, it had taken four strong bushi to put it into its place of honor. Now this little girl had torn it apart, apparently from the inside. Iuchi shugenja had looked at the remnants of the pearl, and their preliminary assessment indicated that the pearl was indeed hollow, possibly had been hollow all along. The pieces were all there; they fit together to form a whole, although a hollow whole. The shugenja had also implied that the weight of the shell was much less than it should have been, that perhaps whatever made the pearl glow had leaked out over the years, making the pearl lighter and lighter as time had passed. There was now no way to tell for certain, since, once the pearl had been put into place, no one had ever tried to lift it again, and now the pearl was broken.

Gaheris heard Ide Tadaji close his fan, nudging the daimyo from his reverie. He straightened up on his throne and rested his hands on his knees.

"Your name," began Gaheris.

"My name is Akasha," said the girl.

"So my people tell me. Where did you get that name?"

The girl shrugged. "It is the only name I know. So it must be my name."

"Do you know what Akasha means?"

"It is my name, so I guess it means me."

Gaheris frowned. He could sense her answers riding in circles, and somewhere in the center was the truth. Time for a new tactic. "How old are you?"

"I do not know."

"I see." Ide Tadaji leaned over and whispered something into the daimyo's ear. Gaheris smiled and asked, "How is it that you speak Rokugani so well?"

"Oh, I learned," she smiled brightly. "I have been listening to your stories for as long as I can remember. They are very good stories. I heard about the Burning Sands, and the Battle of White Shore Plain, and how Utaku Kamoko was brought into the sky to be a constellation, and about finding the Emperor, and the creation of the world, and how Shinjo was the very best Kami, and even that story Tadaji told Michisuna that one night the Scorpion named Yuito was seen withÑ"

"We are well aware of all the stories we told, child," interrupted Tadaji gently. Gaheris looked at the diplomat out of the corner of his eye and made a mental note to speak with him later.

"Well..." she continued, "they are all very good stories, and I liked to hear them."

"But how did you understand?" asked Gaheris.

The girl looked confused. "I heard them tell the stories?" she answered, hesitantly.

"But how is it that you speak our language?" repeated Gaheris. "You are not one of us." At that, the girl froze in place, eyes wide. Gaheris leaned forward and waited for a reply. At length, he got it: a single tear rolled down the girl's face. There followed another, and then another, as her eyes slowly closed and her body started to shake with silent sobs.

"My lord," whispered Tadaji needlessly, "you have upset her."

"Good!" whispered Gaheris back. "Maybe now she'll give us some answers! I am tired of her games; she's holding something back!" He turned back to the little girl. "Stop crying and answer me!" he ordered.

"Do not tell me that I am not one of you!" she shouted back defiantly through her tears. "This is my home, and you cannot make me leave!"

Ide Tadaji leaned toward his daimyo again. "It doesn't look like she's holding anything back to me," he observed quietly.

"She most definitely is not an Utaku," agreed Gaheris.

"No," whispered Tadaji, stroking his graying goatee, "in fact, she rather puts me in mind of her daimyo, when he was younger."

"Her daimyo?" Gaheris paused, then sighed. "You are right, trusted friend. She is brave, she is willful, and she is straightforward. We can ask no more of a Unicorn."

Gaheris popped open his fan and raised it, a gesture of finality. He looked at the young girl. "You shall stay, Akasha, but you must become Unicorn and swear a blood oath to our clan. Arrangements will be made immediately. Do this, and this clan shall be your home. But you must always remember what the clan learned in its long travels: the Unicorn's home is not the castle, not the tent, but the family."

He looked about at the nobles gathered in the hall. "The clan is your family, but it would also help if you had a mother." He gestured to a samurai woman kneeling nearby. "You! You have no children. Take this one."

In the back of the room, the slender woman bowed, then rose to her feet. She shuffled forward daintily to Akasha, smiled, took her hand, and began to escort her out of the throne room. Akasha dried her eyes with the sleeve of her borrowed kimono as she trailed along.

At the door, Akasha pulled her hand free, turned, kneeled, and bowed to Gaheris with perfect etiquette. Then she stood and left the room with her adoptive mother.

"That, my lord," whispered Tadaji, "is a girl with more wisdom than we know."

* * *

Shinjo Masu moved silently through the woods, stalking his prey. The continued warfare was making life very difficult for the clans; hunger was now as much a threat as the spears of the spirits. Fields of rice had been plowed under by warriors' feet, farmers had been pressed into service as soldiers, and, with less grain in the fields, game animals were getting harder to find. Yet somehow, this morning, the sharp-eyed Masu had seen a boar at the margin of the woods near Shiro Shinjo, and he hoped that he would be able to bring it back for the clan.

The boar's tracks were relatively easy to follow in the soft earth, and he held his bow at the ready. His horse paced a bow's shot behind him as quietly as it could. The tracks cut along the edge of a small clearing, and Masu could tell the boar had been trotting along easily. He moved to follow, when a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye startled him. He whipped his bow into firing position, thinking the boar had flanked him.

Instead, he saw Akasha practicing in the clearing. She was tall, lithe, graceful, and recently past her gempukku, and he realized that she was also lovely.

She was dressed immodestly, showing an untraditional amount of skinÑmuch like the Naga had always dressed. She held a spear in her hands and moved fluidly through an elaborate kata that Masu had never seen before. Yet, while she moved, she watched him.

He bowed slightly. "I apologize for interrupting you," he said.

"You did not interrupt," she smiled in answer. "I heard you coming."

"You heardÑhow long have you been here practicing?" he asked, flustered.

"I came out here a little before dawn," she said, her spear spinning and thrusting, slicing through the air. It moved almost like a snake in her hands.

Masu glanced down at the tracks beneath his feet.

"If you are looking for the boar, it went down toward the stream over there," she said, gesturing with her spear. Masu could not tell if the lunge was part of the kata or she had improvised to point the way.

Masu struggled to reconcile everything. "But youÑit did not run off at the sight of you?"

"No, of course not."

Masu thought for a moment, as Akasha continued her routine. Sometimes it seemed like she moved like a willow, others a dragon. It was smooth, elegant... and noiseless. He watched in amazement until she completed the routine.

"How is it that you are so quiet?" he asked respectfully.

"It is hard to explain," she said. "It is a feeling. Perhaps the best way I could describe it is that you walk through the woods. I walk in the woods."

"How did you learn to do that?"

"The same way I learned to use the spear," she said. "From the whispers."

* * *

I have heard the whispers for as long as I can remember," Akasha said, sipping her tea. "You do not... you cannot hear them?" The assembled shugenja shook their heads.

Akasha sat on the carved wooden stand, still in its place in what was still called the Pearl Room. She was the only person who ever sat on the stand; no one else dared, nor could anyone bring themselves to stop her when she had first sat there. She had, as near as anyone could tell, spent her first ten years in that spot.

"Originally, I only heard the whispers in my sleep. It was a cool, comfortable dream, like standing on the beach at dawn. And there was always this smell, like dried leaves and copper. I have never smelled anything quite like it." She paused to smell the tea and shook her head.

"After I learned to meditate, I was able to open my soul enough that I could hear the whispers, just barely. That was the worst. You remember that year or two when I was so temperamental? I could just barely reach the whispers, but I could not understand what they said, and then I would try so hard to hear them that I would usually get frustrated, and that would drive them away. It was agonizing; it was like being lost inside your own soul.

"Eventually, under your guidance, I mastered my anger. If I concentrate, I can feel their presence. It is like a lake of scales. It moves and swirls, like the whispers, but it is also very still. There is no fear there, but there are the whispers.

"The whispers are like strands of silk. I can reach out gently and coax one forth from the lake, and then I can understand it. But I cannot just take one, because I cannot enter the lake."

"What do the whispers say?" asked Horiuchi Shem-Zhe, one of the shugenja.

Akasha swirled her tea in its cup. "All sorts of things. It is not words, really; it is more like paintings... or dances. I can learn things. See things."

"Is that how you learned to fight with the spear?" asked Shem-Zhe.

"Yes. That and other things. I cannot always hold onto them for long; some of the whispers are too big to keep in my head. Some of them are very old, older than I could ever be." There was a long silence as Akasha finished her tea.

Shem-Zhe broke the silence. "Do you know what these whispers are?" he asked. Akasha looked at him. "I believe the whispers are the soul of the Naga race. You seem to be able to tap into their wisdom. It does not surprise me that you can't always retain what you learn; I understand that some of their teachings were based on many lifetimes' experience, far more than we will attain."

"I knew that," said Akasha quietly. "My heart is Unicorn, but my blood is Naga. "I just have to find where my soul belongs."

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